Conventionally, a large amount of moving picture data is reduced by calculating motion vectors between reference frames and generating moving picture data with the motion vectors and the reference images.
On the other hand, a technology has been disclosed for correcting a hand-movement blur by calculating motion vectors between multiple still images shot by an imaging device such as a camera by, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication No. 2003-78807.
The reliability of motion vectors must be increased in order to reproduce the moving picture more accurately and/or correcting the hand-movement blur in shooting. As a technology for increasing the reliability of motion vectors, processing by handling highly correlated motion vectors as those with high reliability is performed as disclosed by Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication Nos. 9-73540, 6-311502, and 6-153146, respectively.
Furthermore, as a technology for maintaining the accuracy of motion vectors and reducing the data amount more at the same time, there is one that identifies feature points of images and calculates motion vectors of the feature points, or there is one that constructs polygons by connecting the feature points, realizes how the polygons are deformed by the movement of the feature points among the target images and estimates the positions where the other points are moved as disclosed by, for example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Publication Nos. 11-506576 and 10-341445, respectively.